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By ZEKE MILLER and AAMER MADHANI
ELK GROVE VILLAGE, Il. (AP) – President Joe Biden wields his weapon of last resort in the country’s fight against COVID-19, as he defends vaccination requirements in a bid to force the roughly 67 million unvaccinated U.S. adults to roll up their sleeves.
It is a tactic he never wanted to use and that he had ruled out before taking office. But now, this is the one he feels compelled to use by a stubborn part of the public who have refused to be vaccinated and endangered the lives of others and the country’s economic recovery.
In the coming weeks, more than 100 million Americans will be subject to the vaccine requirements ordered by Biden. And his administration is encouraging employers to voluntarily take additional steps that would push vaccines on people or subject them to onerous testing requirements.
Forcing people to do something they don’t want to do is rarely a winning political strategy. Yet, with the majority of the country already vaccinated and with industry on his side, Biden has become an unlikely advocate of intimidating tactics to conduct vaccinations.
On Thursday, Biden relayed the message to the Chicago suburbs, visiting a construction site run by Clayco, a large construction company that is about to announce a new vaccination or testing requirement for its workforce. The company is taking action weeks before an upcoming Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule that will require all employers with more than 100 employees to require their staff to be vaccinated or tested weekly for the coronavirus.
White House officials said Biden would encourage other companies to follow suit, taking action before OSHA’s rule and going even further by requiring injections for their employees without offering an option to test.
Biden also planned to meet with United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, whose company has successfully implemented a vaccination mandate, with no options for workers to be tested instead. Less than 1% did not comply and risk being made redundant.
Biden’s warrants “worked spectacularly,” said Lawrence Gostin, a public health expert at Georgetown University Law School. He added that the president’s rules have also had a “modeling effect” for cities, states and businesses. This is what the White House wanted.
U.S. officials began to anticipate the need for a stronger vaccination campaign in April, when the country’s vaccine supply began to exceed demand. The political conditions meant that immediate measures to demand shots would likely have proved counterproductive.
The idea of compulsory vaccination has been rebuffed by critics who argue that it is too far out for government and denies people the right to make their own medical decisions.
So, first of all, officials embarked on a multi-month, multi-billion dollar education and incentive effort to persuade people to get vaccinated on their own.
It was not enough.
By midsummer, the most transmissible delta variant of the virus was eroding months of health and economic progress, and the rate of new vaccinations had slowed. Biden’s strategy has shifted from incitement to compulsion, with a slow and deliberate tightening of vaccination restrictions.
“It’s a good political strategy, but it’s also a good public health strategy, because once you have a lot of people who have already been vaccinated. then the mandates become more acceptable, ”Gostin said.
It all started with a vaccination requirement for frontline federal health workers serving veterans in Virginia hospitals. Then the military, followed in regular succession by all government-reimbursed health care workers, all federal workers, and then the more than 80 million Americans who work in medium and large companies.
Nearly 100 million adult Americans were unvaccinated as of July. That number has been reduced by a third since federal, state and private mandates were imposed.
In conjunction with the president’s trip to Chicago, the White House released a report that describes early successes of vaccination warrants to increase immunization rates and attempts to economically justify businesses and local governments for implementing warrants. It points to everything from reduced employee hours to declining restaurant reservations in areas with fewer vaccinations, not to mention markedly reduced cases of serious illness and death from the virus in areas with low vaccination rates. higher.
Millions of workers, the White House notes, say they still cannot work due to the effects of the pandemic, because their workplaces have been closed or service has been cut, or because they are afraid to work or cannot get child care.
“The evidence is extremely clear that these vaccine mandates are working,” said Charlie Anderson, director of economic policy and budget for the White House COVID-19 response team. “And now I think it’s a good time to get up and say, ‘Now is the time to move, if you haven’t already. “”
While warrants are the ultimate tool in pushing Americans to get vaccinated, Biden has resisted, at least so far, requiring injections or testing for interstate or international air travel, a move that the officials say. legal experts, is within its purview. Officials said it was under review.
“We have a track record, and I think it’s clear, it shows that we are pulling the levers available to demand vaccinations,” said Jeff Zients, the White House COVID-19 coordinator. “And we’re not taking anything off the table.”
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Miller reported from Washington.
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